How buyer personas help sales teams succeed
Glenn Robinson, Head of Creative
Buyer personas are the key to preparing and empowering your sales team for success. To paraphrase the great Chinese military general and strategist Sun Tzu, if you know the enemy and you know yourself, you need not fear the result.
While your potential customers are certainly not the enemy, Sun Tzu’s theory also applies to sales. That is, the more your sales team knows about your typical buyer, the easier it will be for them to secure their business. Buyer personas are essential because they enable salespeople to truly know who they’re selling to.
Without thoroughly researched and precisely crafted buyer personas, your sales team is essentially going in cold. And you know what they say about poor performance and the Six Ps of Planning.
Buyer personas key to understanding your customers
While today information is more accessible than it’s ever been, helping your sales team to truly understand your target market isn’t simply a case of finding their profile on LinkedIn or other social channels and peering into their professional history and personal life. Nor is it simply reading the About Us page on a company website.
“Without thoroughly researched and precisely crafted buyer personas, your sales team is essentially going in cold.”
A buyer persona is a fictional, generalised representation of your ideal customers. While fictional, buyer personas are most effective when grounded in fact. When well researched and precisely created, buyer personas provide a truly deep understanding of the kind of person or organisation that needs or wants what you’re selling.
Buyer personas equip your sales team with the essential customer information needed to precisely speak to the concerns, challenges, desires, and goals of your target audience. They instruct your salespeople on how to talk to prospects in a nuanced, personally tailored way. As such, they should be the secret weapon of your sales team.
The critical questions that buyer personas answer
When you have highly researched and precisely created buyer personas, your sales team will have the answers to many questions about the customer that are essential for sales success. These include answers to questions such as:
- What is their position and job title?
- Are they a decision-maker in their company?
- What is the size of their company?
- What is their gender and age?
- What are their pain points?
- What are their goals?
- What would they like to accomplish in the next year?
- What is their combined household income?
- What are the problems they regularly face, or are currently facing?
Once you have all of this important information, you can use it to define two essential things:
- Common objectives that buyers will likely provide to your sales team during the sales process; and
- How your sales people can best facilitate the sale by countering those common objectives.
How to create buyer personas
Well-developed buyer personas will reveal common misconceptions and barriers of entry that your target audience might have towards your business.
The best way to create effective buyer personas is to base them upon facts and thorough research. Start by seeking first-hand insights from your existing customers; the more recent, the better. Interview them, if possible, while also seek informed insights from market research organisations, sales training experts, and strategic marketers.
How buyer personas can turn the tide in your business
When you invest in developing precise buyer personas for your sales team, you will soon notice that frustration and fear over lack of leads will subside, replaced by incremental and sustained improvements in sales.
“The best way to create effective buyer personas is to base them upon facts and thorough research.”
But with buyer personas in hand, it’s not just your sales team that will be better positioned to succeed. Your whole business will enjoy greater success, simply because the information and insights in great buyer personas are useful for all key decision-makers in your business, from managers to marketers.
As part of our sales training service, we help businesses develop highly researched, in-depth buyer personas that provide sales teams with the critical insights needed for sales success.
KEEP IN TOUCH
